Columnist Susan Snyder: St. Thomas awash with memories

Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003 | 8:16 a.m.

Verna Heller was just entering eighth grade when her family had to move because the federal government was going to flood her hometown.

The 84-year-old Logandale resident recalled the family odyssey that began in 1932 with news that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation intended to flood St. Thomas to create what is now Lake Mead.

"My dad traded his Model T for a 1932 Chevy touring (car). And we drove all the way to Canada, looking for a place to live," Heller said Monday. "We came back down and settled in Springville, Utah. But my mother was so homesick, she was physically ill."

So the family traveled to Logandale, the closest they could be to the little town that was swallowed whole by waters rising behind Hoover Dam.

Heller's parents lived in St. Thomas when she was born in 1919 in St. George, Utah, which had the nearest hospital.

"My folks went up there in an old (horse-drawn) wagon. It took three days," Heller said. "My older sister went with them. My mom and my sister slept on straw and under quilts in the wagon. My dad slept under the wagon."

Life in St. Thomas was hard but good, she said. Families ate whatever they could raise and made their own clothes.

"We had enough to eat and good clothes. Nobody knew they were poor because everybody was poor," she said. "It was like one big family, actually. It was a very good place to live."

And hot. Heller said winds came from the south "just like a furnace."

"We slept outside until Thanksgiving. You couldn't sleep inside," she said. Some people watered down their sheets.

"But I couldn't stand sleeping on wet sheets. So I went out and laid in the irrigation ditches at night."

Heller's family left with the others in 1932. It was a gradual migration, she said, and most people ended up finding a better standard of living. She was a senior in high school when her parents moved to Logandale. After graduation she married and lived in California and Northern Nevada before returning to Logandale once more.

Heller recalled St. Thomas being revealed by receding lake waters many years ago. She and her husband picked through the ruins.

"We found so many coins, little pieces of jewelry and odds and ends," Heller said. "I told him there was no use looking in our yard. We were so poor that if we lost anything we had to find it. But we found a few coins."

Heller hasn't visited St. Thomas this time around, however. National Park Service officials are keeping curious visitors and treasure seekers at bay. Agency archaeologists want to study what's left of St. Thomas to gain clues about life in a 19th-century desert town.

"When it was under water, it was preserved. It was frozen in time," Roxanne Day, a park service spokeswoman, said.

A time when the federal government's priority was taming the Colorado River's fickle fury. A 1930s federal law demanded salvaging historical information from public land destined for irretrievable uses. But it didn't go into effect in time for St. Thomas.

"They don't want anybody in there now, and I think that's a shame," Heller said. "It'll just be covered with water again."